Every VP and Director lives this reality: It's mid-January 2025, and your plate is already full. Finance needs its new reporting system, Marketing is racing to launch the new product, and DevOps is handling their usual priorities. Everyone agrees that data is a “top priority,” but for some reason, your transformation project keeps sliding to tomorrow's to-do list.
We watched a $2 million data overhaul die this exact death – death by a thousand polite delays.
We watched a $2 million data overhaul die this exact death – death by a thousand polite delays. Despite being labeled 'top priority,' last-minute meeting cancellations turned into weeks of silence. Slack messages disappeared into the void. VPs went dark. And predictably, every division seemed to have its own pressing issue that just couldn't wait.
Then we saw the opposite scenario play out at one of our clients – we'll call them Legacy Assurance Group – and everything clicked. Their CEO skipped the usual “priority theater” and made “Data is our future” more than just a slogan. Weekly updates with the Chief Data Officer weren’t optional; if departments deadlocked, the CEO personally stepped in to break it.
That kind of top-down clarity paid off big time: The team delivered a working data platform in just six months – practically unheard of in a large organization. Gone was the tangled, two-week turnaround for debugging “spaghetti” ETL code. In its place, Legacy built a modern setup with data governance, catalogs, and profiling (with high business participation!), so everyone could trust the numbers.
This shift proved invaluable when COVID hit, and insurance claims skyrocketed – they quickly identified questionable claims, forecasted needs more accurately, and even saved money by decommissioning outdated mainframe systems.
The sauce here wasn’t that special. It’s just that their “why” was crystal clear, and they backed it with leadership action that turned talk into tangible results.
We've learned this truth repeatedly – data and analytics projects die quietly when leaders stop actively championing them. Every all-hands mention, and every quick Slack update keeps the momentum alive.
When the top leader doesn't just support but actively clears roadblocks, political turf wars evaporate and teams find solutions instead of excuses.
Without true executive backing, your project becomes the thing everyone supports but nobody has time for – death by good intentions.
Executive support creates the environment for success, but execution comes down to how you structure and empower your team.
Here's the reality of making it work:
It's Tuesday morning, and a VP tasks the analytics lead with preparing a detailed sales report for Thursday's board meeting. At the same time, another executive really needs customer retention metrics for a meeting that same day. Between constant context-switching and data reconciliation, there's no time left to address why these requests keep happening in the first place.
Many companies try to manage this by dividing teams into 'build' and 'run' groups. The intent makes sense: separate daily operations from transformation efforts. But I've watched this create a painful disconnect where builders lack operational context, and the operations team resists changes they weren't part of designing. It often devolves into tension between the 'cool project' team and those left managing the daily fires.
A more effective strategy we recommend involves rotating team members between operational tasks and transformation work. When the people handling urgent requests also help design solutions, you get practical improvements that actually stick. They know which processes waste the most time, which data sources cause trust issues, and most importantly, what solutions are most likely to work in practice.
If handling transformation as a side project was going to work, you'd be there by now. Instead, success demands real executive support, dedicated funding to build the right team, and a strong product owner who can both shield the team from constant interruptions and ensure the business still gets what it needs to make informed decisions.
Even with executive backing and the right team in place, companies still struggle to turn data into decisions that matter.
We'll explore why centralizing all your data isn't enough, and what it really takes to transform raw information into something that helps move the needle for your business.
